...Dorothea Salo [is the] Digital Repository Librarian at University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the blog Caveat Lector. Dorothea is well known for her role in the institutional repository and scholarly communications communities; she's the author of the widely read eprint on IRs "Innkeeper at the Roach Motel," forthcoming in the Fall 2008 Library Trends....
Q1. ...[W]hat do you think about "libraries' feasible and proper roles in scholarly communication?"
I think a lot of things. I think the institutional repository was a noble and worthwhile experiment, but as a tool for redressing the imbalances in the scholarly-communication system, it is a failure. It may be reborn if the Harvard experiment succeeds, but that very much remains to be seen. This doesn't mean that I think IRs are useless; they don't have to be, though they often are. It does mean that we're going to have to go after the serials crisis in other ways.
I think we libraries have a lot of market power that we are not using properly. I've heard publishers talk about their industry, and what they invariably say is "we will follow the money." That means libraries; as individual subscriptions dwindle, WE are the ones with the money. They'll follow us -- but we aren't leading them toward open access. We're squealing like stuck pigs about the stalemate, yes, but we're not reallocating any of our serials funds to support gold open access. I think this is a serious mistake....
There is also a serious and ugly undercurrent of anti-OA backlash among faculty....Librarians trifle with that at our peril, and we know it. So we sigh, and put every cent we have toward subscriptions, and feel backed against the wall....
I want to see us cancelling overpriced journals, regardless of their impact factors or usage statistics, and standing up to faculty when they ask why. We need to say "no" loudly and clearly more often, and we need to divert some of the serials money we save thereby to gold open access. (Some should go back to monographs, of course.)
As a matter of strategy, then, the open-access movement needs to target serials and e-resources librarians with requests for support of gold OA....
I think some of us [librarians] have futures as publishing support specialists. Open Journal Systems isn't going away. I don't know how big this will become, truthfully, but I do know that I trust librarians a lot more than I trust other potential and actual players in this space. Big-pig publishers lost credibility as scholarship's dutiful handmaidens long ago, and I'm nearly as cynical about scholarly societies, which had their chance to stand with us but stuck by the big pigs instead. A pox on both their houses; if the scholarly societies are right and open access sinks some of them, I'm perfectly baffled as to why I as a librarian should care....
Q7. In terms of the future of IRs over the next, say, five years, what would the best and worst case scenarios be?
Worst case is easy: they are defunded and die. Harvard delayed that, but I don't think they have prevented it. If the software remains obtuse and difficult, if the goals remain socio-culturally impractical, if the services remain under-resourced and poorly understood, IRs are doomed. At a good many institutions, I believe this is inevitable, still; it's just going to take a little longer than I initially thought. The five-year time horizon you specify should suffice.
Best case: IRs shift from "warehouse at the end of the digital train tracks" to a set of services and systems that manage, safeguard, and shepherd the digital products of the research process all the way through, soup to nuts. We have successful examples of this already, particularly in Australia, and Europe is starting to build them as well. In this country, I suspect they aren't going to grow out of IRs -- they'll be part of the funder-initiated and IT-spearheaded movement to cope with research data locally. This is my warning call to libraries: if we're not in on these discussions, we'll be shut out of the resulting services, and that's bad for all concerned....
Q8. ...What major changes do you see happening in the next few years in terms of some of the major issues such as journal publishing, publishers' business models, the role of scholarly societies, and the open access movement? ...
The publishing lobby will continue its stunning mendacity, largely though not entirely unopposed by rank-and-file publishers. There will be more open-access journals. It is likely to become harder to assert that open-access journals are unsustainable, but that won't stop the publishing lobby from trying -- and it won't stop a few gold journals from folding, either. We will continue to argue about citation advantages, and just what a citation is worth. Faculty will continue to feel whipsawed by all this....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/06/2008 11:01:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
